Clay Davidson was something of a two-hit wonder. His first song was on the mediocre side of decent. This one, though, was a winner. And it came with a music video with wrestling and wrestlers in it, including Jerry “The Next Mayor of Memphis” Lawler and a trimmer Chris Harris. What’s not to love?

The video quality isn’t great. There’s a sliightly better-quality video that I can’t embed here.

I’ve been reading Chuck Klosterman’s Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto, a collection of essays about low culture and Generation-X culture. The first essay I read (appearing somewhere in the middle of the book) makes some really good points about country music:

You can’t really learn much about a person based on what kind of music they happen to like. As a personality test, it doesn’t work even half of the time. However, there is at least one thing you can learn: The most wretchet people in the world are those who tlel you they like every kind of music “except country.” People who say that are boorish and pretentious at the same time. All it means is that they’ve managed to figure out the most rudimentary rule of pop psychology; they know that the hipsters gauge the coolness of others by their espoused taste in sound, and they know that hipsters hate modern country music. And they hate it because it speaks to normal people in a tangible, rational manner. Hipsters hate it because they hate Midwesterners,, and they hate Southerners, and they hate people with real jobs.

Now, obviously, this hipster distaste doesn’t apply to old country music, because everybody who’s cool loves that stuff (or at least claims to). Nobody questions the value of George {expletive} Jones. It’s completely acceptable for coolies to adore the idea of haggard nineteen-year-old men riding in cabooses and having their hearts shattered, which is why alternative country is the most popular musical genre of the last twenty-five years that’s managed to remain completely unpopular (if you follow my meaning).

I sort of used to be one of those “except country” people, except back in my day it was “except country and rap.” It was a relatively common reply at the time (with and without the “and rap”). At Mayne High School it wasn’t so much a hipster thing as it was a class thing, to the extent that you can differentiate between the two. I went to an upper-crest high school and suggesting that you didn’t like country music separated you from those folks that came to school wearing the big belt buckles. A special sort of conspicuous country music fan that we called “kikkers”.

The first time I started running into hipsteria was on Camelot BBS. The kind of music you liked was not completely unimportant at Mayne High (though interestingly it was more of a social qualifier amongst guys than girls), it became much more of a market of who you were in Camelot. It makes sense in its own sort of way since the biggest music people at Mayne High School tended to fill the ranks of the not-popular and un-popular. The Homecoming Queen aside, there were few actual popular people in Camelot. If you can’t be good, be different. If people that you don’t believe are better than you are treated as though they are, find your own reason why you are better. Like, cause your taste in music rox and theirs sux.

And that is, on its darkest level, what hipsterism is. The desire of those that don’t fit the standard criteria for social worthiness to create their own. A music critic in a cramped NYC apartment may not make as much as some corporate type with a trophy wife, but by gawd at least he has taste in music. I’m not saying that’s the only reason why people delineate based on musical or artistic tastes, but that’s a part of it.

The noteworthy thing about the Except Country response, is that not only is it hipsterism at its worst, but it’s a particular kind of lazy hipsterism. Are these people really saying that they actually like all kinds of music that doesn’t come with a twang? They would spend their free time listening to African bongo drum music or whatever? Morbid Angel? Del Shannon? Engima? Indigo Girls? You can like all of these things, and yet somehow country music is just beyond you? Yeah, okay. Of course, they often don’t know who Morbid Angel and Enigma are. Or maybe they’re worried that they’re talking to someone that likes Indigo Girls or something and don’t want to say anything mean (country fans, of course, are fair game). But generally I take it to be the response to someone that listens largely to Top 40, doesn’t want to sound like a sheep, doesn’t really care about the specific genres that they’re hearing, and don’t want to sound completely indifferent.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with laziness when it comes to music. Most people are pretty lazy. They eat the diet that the radio feeds them because it’s really not worth their time to go out and find new stuff. I used to be in that category and probably still would be if it weren’t for the R&B-infusion in pop music and the excessive commercials and chatter that drove me away from the radio. I’m hardly an aficionado when it comes to music. I like what I like and I don’t like what I don’t like. So by and large, I am more forgiving of “except country” responses and merely ask them who some of their favorite bands are (which, btw, is the best way to answer the question in the first place).

The smugness of singling out the single sort of distasteful music, however, does particularly grate when they go out of their way to say why they don’t like country music. It’s less of a problem now than it used to be, but it used to often demonstrate in no uncertain terms that they didn’t listen to enough country music to single it out. They will talk about how all country songs are about this and that when really comparatively few are. Almost none, really. Country music stopped being about losing your wife/mother/girlfriend/house/dog a long time ago. If they would simply say that they don’t care much for country music because of the pedestrian themes of the lyrics or because they can’t relate to the glorification of rural America and/or the working class or because they like a more electric sound, I wouldn’t figuratively roll my eyes.

That leads me into Klosterman’s other observation, which is that people that say “except country” will often double right back and carve an exception to the exception for classical country. This flies right in the face of many of the complaints about country music. Half the time, whatever they say they hate about country music applies doubly so to the classical stuff. One of the biggest things to dislike about contemporary country music is how much like everything else it has become. Say you dislike country for the same reason you dislike pop and I immediately understand where you’re coming from. Say that you dislike country because it’s inbred hick music and then mention “But Willie Nelson is okay” and you’ve lost my attention. The twang that they complain about is less pronounced than ever for the most part. Fewer fiddlers, fewer steel guitarists.

Klosterman goes on to sing the praises of country music (which he personally does not care for). I think I’ll post on that at some point, too, so stay tuned.

Listening to Grey’s Anatomy while I work. The current plotline is that a previously straight character has begun to wonder if she is a lesbian (or, more likely bisexual), particularly in relation to another character that she’s close to.

I don’t really like Suzie-questions-her-sexuality for a number of reasons. First, because it’s just not interesting to me. For some reason, these plotlines always come across as overly transparent. There typically is no natural evolution for it. It’s like they flipped a gay-plot coin that came up “Yes!’ and then threw a dart onto a dartboard to decide which to assign it to. Actually, that latter part isn’t true; I will get to that in a minute. But the character either turns out to be gay or not and it typically doesn’t even matter because the character is on their way out anyway.

What I said before about the dart board, that’s not true because they generally choose characters that they can’t find other ways to make interesting. Either the character was brought in as eye-candy and little character development had occurred or the character was bought in by happenstance and the writers ran out of material. In the case of Grey’s Anatomy, it’s the latter. And of course because these characters are atypical (in their own way), I particularly liked them over the ones that they decided “Hey, we’re going to make this cute-quirky-insecure girl and this other ambitious-cold girl and the character gets cast a particular way. In short, these two characters were my favorite female ones on the show. It’s not even close. So naturally one is questioning her sexuality vis-a-vis the other (who seems non-committal on her sexuality).

I wonder if that’s the main reason that I don’t like Lesbian plots. They so frequently involve my favorite characters. I like the characters that don’t stand out in a typecast way. I like a certain take-chargedness and emotional ruggedness that writers may often look at and say “Hey, she would make a good lesbian). I like outcast characters and lesbianism is always a good excuse for otherness or emotional standoffishness. And I like odballs I think harkening back to the days when I thought anybody that wasn’t an oddball wouldn’t have anything to do with me (something I have come to call “The Luna Lovegood Appeal”)

Then again, this sort of transcends cop-out TV show writing. More than a couple of celebrities I’ve taken a liking to in a vaguely-attraction-related-way and turned out to be lesbians (and linked). I had a very early crush on Ellen DeGeneres from her days on “Open House” and was immediately taken by Melissa Etheridge. And don’t get me started on the magnificent Sara Gilbert. So maybe I can’t fault the writers at all. Maybe I’m just a wrong-gendered lesbian.

When we were in high school, my best friend Clint wrote a short story about a kid that snaps one day in school and begins creatively slaughtering his classmates. It was called “The Hero” and of course we all loved it. Had it been written in the post-Columbine era, we probably would have been dragged into the office of a psychologist or principal or detective. But when Columbine happened, the instinct of a lot of us was… understanding. We didn’t agree with what they did, but as Chris Rock said of OJ Simpson, we could understand it. Push kids far enough and see what happens! We found a degree of commonality with those ruthless killers. Of course, we find out years later that they were nothing like us. They weren’t misunderstood rejects… they were bullies. Their actions were not a response to their passive existence, but instead were the culmination of their aggressive one.

When I was in college, I had a professor that liked to talk about Mark Richard Hilburn and Larry Jason, two of the infamous cadre of postal workers that inspired the phrase “going postal”. In the Professor’s estimation, postal workers were the perfect example of what Marx was talking about when he discussed the alienation of man from his labor. He described the working environments of postal sorters in such grim detail that there seemed to be a sort of rationality to the response of going insane. In fact, I had the previous week applied for a job at UPS (they had a lot of night-time jobs that were ideal for college students) and immediately decided not to take the job. The Professor went on to say that this is what capitalism is doing to all of us. Leaving aside for a moment that the USPS is not a capitalist enterprise and that capitalism is especially good at automating tedious work of the sort that can drive a person insane, and leaving aside that we didn’t know that Hilburn and Jason were, in fact, sorters, a sense of understanding was required as to what is being done to us and how we are simply responding to the systems at work that we are forced to participate in.

One thing that a lot of people don’t do that they should is to take on the mantle of their ideological opponents and try to articulate counter-arguments to your own perspective. The ability to do so is one of my strengths, so of course I value it. But it’s important to try to take opposing arguments seriously even if you don’t end up buying into them. From a writer’s perspective it’s particularly important. Hollywood’s frequent failure to do so often results in a worse product because their characters take the role of preaching bowling balls knocking down straw pins. So I can very much appreciate Phi taking on the role of a liberal interlocutor on the subject of George Sodini:

Why is it that the Half Sigma / Steve Sailer blogging community, when confronted with, say, the murder of Lily Burke, or the crimes in Knoxville and Wichita and God-knows-where-else, we sound the HBD trumpet and rush to man the barricades? But when George Sodini murders an aerobics class, suddenly we get all root-causey and meta-narrative-social-justicy?

In this case, however, I think that his self-generated foil has a remarkably good point. It was actually something that I had thought about. Before I get started, I want to put the extent to which “root causes” as an explanation for urban crime is legitimate. I’m not arguing that it is or is not, but as longtime readers know I am somewhat allergic to race-based debates in Hit Coffee’s comment section. For the sake of context I will state that my personal take is that searches for “root causes” are of some, but limited, utility. If it can lead to realistic policy or social changes, it may be worth investigating (which, of course, we have been). However, there reaches a point where the countermeasures are so lofty and logistically impossible that it devolves into making excuses for behavior that a society cannot tolerate regardless of its causes.

There is definite value in trying to understand what contributes to substantially anti-social behavior. This is true whether we are talking about high school kids that snap or men that go around killing women. I have great respect for people who make it their career to get into the heads of people whose heads are very unpleasant places. I don’t always think that they’re right, but they go places where right-thinking people should fear to tread. But I am nonetheless quite bothered with the reflexive empathy that people extend towards people they perceive to be like themselves. Sometimes this empathy is a reflection of this person doing what they may secretly dream of in a visceral sort of way (Klebold and Harris to Clint and me, for instance). More frequently, though, it’s simply a matter of seeing more of yourself in the perpetrator than in the victims.

Despite his Internet presence, we don’t really know a whole lot about George Sodini. The big thing we know is that he was dateless and went off and killed some women. Suggestions that he had trouble getting dates because he was the sort of guy that would go off and kill women have largely been shot down. Because he has no severed heads in his refrigerator, we are less to assume that he was normal (if sad and lonely) prior to becoming lethal. People that are predisposed to believe that men are so frequently lonely because women withhold themselves for an ever-decreasing portion of the male population are inclined to give him more benefits of the doubt than not.

So yeah, it’s more than a little suspicious to me that people that are willing to write off 95% of crimes commited, that believe that searches for understand and root causes are a bunch of claptrap, are all of the sudden saying “Hold it there, cowboy, this may be more than a guy that just flew off his rocker. There are cultural aspects to consider here. No one approves of what he did, but it’s important that we take the time and effort to understand why he did it. And the role that women and feminist society played in that.”

But even aside from the murders, there are reasons to believe that he was dysfunctional. Despite appearing to be of above-normal intelligence, his academic career was winding. That he had a job doesn’t demonstrate much as we’re debating his emotional state and not his intelligence. He suddenly stopped drinking many years back (often an indicator for alcohol abuse). His sense of style was off-kilter. He may or may not have a kid. His social venues are ones typically not desired by single men and/or places where there is a presumption of acceptance (church). Even apart from a dearth of romantic options, indications are that he had trouble making friends. He expressed having difficulty emotionally connecting with people.

In a vacuum, it’s mostly harmless stuff. Now all of this could describe a lot of people. Indeed, a lot of it describes me. But, though it pains me to say it, I am a weird guy. So these can all be indications of an eccentric personality or the tip of an iceberg. But they’re not indicative of someone that can expect a whole lot of success with women. Or with friends. I’ve been able to get by in large part by gaining a stronger sense of appropriateness and a more chameleon-like personality than a lot of people with my personality abnormalities can muster. And if I ever did fly off my rocker and kill people, it would have much more to do with my personality than how society dealt with it.

When I was in early high school, to the extent that I was visible I gave out some unfortunate vibes about myself. More than one of Clint’s female friends thought I was a weird stalker sort. They expressed a completely ungrounded fear of me. It stung a little bit, but Clint and I were able to actually have fun with it. We came up with creepy ways that I could act around them to bone up my stalker cred. One day Clint shared this with one of the girls and she was horrified. The fact that I was well-adjusted enough to laugh it off (as opposed to react violently or with great hostility) apparently didn’t mean anything. I was, from the outside looking in to people (of both genders) that didn’t know me well, a weird guy.

Now, I could look at this and look at Sodini and take common cause. Actually, my reaction is something of the opposite. It is my personal similarities to Sodini that make me disinclined to give him much sympathy. Indeed, they’re the things that make me feel more contempt for him more personally than I do, say, Andrea Yates. It’s people like Sodini that give people like me a bad name. Weird people like him are why a lot of women were disinclined to date people like me. Why they feared me. Granted, few men will ever become a Sodini, but the inappropriate behavior can take a hundred different faces. A sense of safety can be understandably stripped by a lot less than physical violence actualized.

I took what I learned from the vibes I was giving out and I learned from them. I learned to behave in ways that were less off-putting. I gained a better sense of the appropriate. I learned how to be socially acceptable. I’ll never really be able to do what I would need to do in order to be a popular and really well liked guy, but I generally know how not to repel. Sodini was either capable of doing this and chose not to, in which case he deserves a degree of revulsion or he lacked the self-awareness or self-acknowledgment to know his role in the problem, which makes him less culpable but beyond what a good-lovin’ woman is likely to be able to fix. In neither case am I likely to look at him as someone that more (or less) deserves to be understood than Lorena Bobbitt, Lisa Nowack, Michael Lee.

Watching hurricane reports are an annual tradition of our annual family retreat to Shell Beach.

Hurricane Bound For Texas Slowed By Large Land Mass To The South

And you can’t go wrong with Ninja stories.

Ninja Parade Slips Through Town Unnoticed Once Again

I’m the first to say that I don’t actually know a whole lot about cars. And a good bulk of what I do know, particularly when it comes to makes and models, I’ve learned over the past couple of months as I’ve been abstractly car shopping. But while I don’t know much, I know that the Toyota Prius is one ugly car. Not even a little bit off, as a lot of cars are. Rather, it is the ugliest car on the road today. And, of course, one of the most popular.

So the question arises as to why they created a car that I find so unattractive. I can think of a handful of possible reasons for this.

• I’m wrong, it’s not ugly. Or rather, my tastes are unusual and I am one of the few people that do not like the car design. I don’t think that this is so because it is ugly in a very distinct sort of way. But maybe it’s not that unique (see below) or if it is unique, it’s just different. There’s no accounting for taste, I suppose.
• I’m wrong, it’s not unique. It’s not a design that other manufacturers are replicating (with one notable exception). Were it part of a larger trend, I’d be bemoaning the trend rather than the Prius itself. On the other hand, it’s not that distinct. And it does tie in a little bit with a recent trend of what I can extended-butt cars. Sometimes I think that this works, as with the PT Cruiser (one of the nicest looking cars, in my opinion), but mostly it’s not something I care much for. I guess the rationale for it is more trunk space and that I can appreciate. But the Prius seems relatively unique in that it doesn’t seem to be maximizing trunk (vertical) space the way that a lot of hatchbacks do. It’s sort of an in-between, unable to determine whether it’s a sedan or a hatchback in design.
• It’s aerodynamic and/or maximizes mileage for hybrid engines and/or safety with lighter materials. Again, the problem with this theory is that it’s relatively unique. Civic Hybrids don’t ape the design, for instance, nor do Camry Hybrids. Then again, the Civic is a Civic. It’s design is set by the regular model it’s attached to. Same for a Camry. Notably, the Prius gets better mileage than the other two despite appearing to be slightly larger than a Civic. The Camry Hybrid doesn’t get very good mileage except when compared to a regular Camry. So the idea could be that the Prius model should be designed to maximize the Hybrid technology and turning it into a more hatchbacky or sedany design would negate that somehow. Also possible is that the Prius model is built lighter and would get better mileage even if it looked like a lightly outsized Civic. The fact that the Honda Insight, another purely hybrid model, looks similar suggests that maybe there is something about the look that works uniquely well with hybrids.
• It has to be ugly to be conspicuous because the good designs were taken. This would be one of the main reasons to get a Prius rather than a Civic or Camry Hybrid. People see you in it and they know that you’re driving a Hybrid. The Civic and Camry they only know if they see the decal. Plus, if you’re asked what kind of car you drive, you can be all cool and say “Prius” whereas if you say “Civic” you could be losing that environmental cred unless you append “Hybrid”, in which case you may be being too conspicuously environmentally correct. Better to have a model that speaks for itself. While this may purely conspicuous in the same way that paying extra to drive an Acura to differentiate yourself from lowly Honda drivers, it is not necessarily so. There is a value in this conspicuousness if it promotes virtue. Driving an Acura says “I’m better than you” or “I’m as good as you”, driving a Prius could be seen as “I am driving an environmentally conscious car and you should, too.” Assuming that one believes that reducing carbon emissions is a lofty goal, this is a public good. And it’s a public good that driving a Civic or Camry Hybrid only provide privately. And it could be that Honda is going for the same thing with the Insight.
• It’s cheaper that way. The Prius and Insight are cheaper than the Civic and Camry Hybrids. They’re both actually surprisingly affordable cars. So rather than it being a marker of conspicuousness, maybe it’s a marker for thriftiness. That’s something I could get behind. I don’t exactly drive sexxy cars myself…

Back when I was at Southern Tech, I struck up a friendship with a girl named Renata Guittierez. Despite having very different political views, we got along well in most every other respect, did quite well hanging out with each others’ friends and family, and turned out to have mutual friends like Hubert and Will, most of whom she’d known during high school while I met them in the dorms.

In fact, numerous friends continually tried to get us to date. We both demurred – probably for the best given that she met her eventual husband at Hubert’s wedding.

Throughout the years, the one major issue on which we were opposed has always been politics. She’s extremely activist; I’m more laid-back. She has “key issues” on which, quite frankly, I think the fundamental premise is fatally flawed. Despite this, even our political discussions were usually quite lively and fun, because we didn’t take anything said personally, and because we both knew to stay on the realm of discussing policy rather than mouthing the usual platitudes/insults that pass for “political discussion” from the political parties these days. Any time I wanted to mentally say “all members of X party are Z”, I mentally remind myself of Renata and Hubert, who didn’t come even close to that 95% of the time.

A while ago, however, she and her husband moved away from Colosse, so that he could take an offered job in neighboring Pontchartrain. Ever since, her level of political discourse has been steadily deteriorating. Very little is about policy for her any more – it’s much more about making personal insults towards leaders of the opposition party, while explaining away her party’s very real faults as being something the other side supposedly “cooked up” or that “shouldn’t matter.” Whereas before, I could count on her for a relatively accurate fecometric (read: how much of an asshole are they) reading on a politician from her own party, that’s no longer the case.

I’m beginning to wonder about Pontchartrain. I know it has a growing Hispanic population. I know it’s more heavily tilted towards her side of the aisle. I didn’t think it would do that much damage, however, and I have to confess some serious concerns as to whether the city itself is such an echo chamber, or whether the move to a new city – and her strident political careerism plus the ability to “pick” a new set of local friends, most likely gleaned from her starting pool of political colleagues – has simply led her to construct a close-knit echo chamber of “new friends” with some extreme blinders as to the fact that we on the other side are not, in fact, represented by some of the vitriolic rhetoric she’s lately been spreading.

As readers of Hit Coffee know, I toy around with Linux from time to time. I keep running into walls that prevent me from making the transition that I long to make, but I keep hoping that the next version of Linux that comes out will be the one that lets me cross that particular bridge. And one of these days, Lucy will not pull the football out from under me…

I think that Microsoft’s monopoly over the OS market was, once upon a time, a very useful thing. I’ll get into this more later, but for consumer computers to really take off, people needed to have a standard. It would have taken things in the United States considerably longer to develop of there were three or four OSes that software developers had to port to.

However, now that the progress has been made, I have come to see Microsoft’s domination of the market as being somewhat counterproductive. I would prefer they receive some real competition to encourage them to actually make a better OS. I was quite happy at the shellacking they got with Vista. Seven is supposed to be better, but they’ve been dropping the ball for so long we’re grading on a curve.

So I’m not the biggest fan of Microsoft or of Windows. Though I use their product, I want to be a Linux user. I doubt I ever will be, but I remain ever hopeful.

But while I don’t necessarily like being a Windows person and would like to but can’t be a Linux person, one thing I will never be is an Apple person.

I think that the so-called “Apple Tax” is overblown if not non-existent when you compare like computers. Offering a better, more expensive product does not a tax make. I also do not believe that most Apple users purchase Apple’s products just to be cool. I’ve heard too many testimonials from people whose opinions I respect about the superiority of their product. Not enough to believe that it’s absolutely superior, but enough to believe that it is that way in the eyes of many.

Though I’ve never used one, I am more inclined than not to believe that the iPhone is the best device in its market. That they were able to enter the market and just dominate the US contingent of it so quickly, making non-Mac users fall in love with it along the way, impresses me a great deal. Though I will not get an iPhone, that doesn’t stop me from being very impressed by it.

And because of this, as well as a superior marketing aparatus, they’re had enormous crossover success into people that are not generally Apple users. They’re coming to dominate the mobile market the same way that Microsoft does the desktop market.

And the thought horrifies me.

I don’t just consider it a good thing that Microsoft won the OS wars of the 90s because somebody had to win. I definitely don’t consider it a good thing because they had the best OS (I don’t believe they did). I am glad that they won because they were the ones that were not hardware-specific. The Mac OS of the time had to be run on Apple or licensed clones. Amiga Workbench had to be run on Amiga computers or licensed clones. OS/2 wasn’t hardware specific as far as I know, but it was owned by IBM and were not as independent as Microsoft.

Whatever Microsoft’s sins as far as anti-competitiveness, the fact that they were not a desktop manufacturer and did not have a dog in that hunt was a real boon to computer users.

But mostly, when it comes to a desire to control the user, Microsft has nothing on Apple. Apple’s insistence on controlling the hardware may lead to a better user experience (less driver issues, for one thing), but it also limits user flexibility when it comes to swapping out parts and building your own machine. And it allows them to do things like run up prices with more expensive hardware. They don’t have to make a cheap Mac cause they know that nobody else is. They can have the customers they want and only the customers they want.

In the Mobile OS market, things are generally more restrictive by necessity. It’s harder to just install an OS and some drivers the same way that you can for a computer. So different devices are meant for different OSes. Arrangements differ in the mobile OS world, where on one hand you have open-source options like Symbian and Android, in the middle you have Windows Mobile which is closed-source but comes on a wide variety of devices, and then you have Apple, who only release the OS on their own product.

That itself wouldn’t be so much of a problem (there was only one Android device for a while), but Apple has such a top-down, integrated approach that they insist on retaining a lot of control over, well, everything. They decide who your cell provider can be. They decide what applications you can install. If Microsoft were to declare that they’re just not going to allow the installation of certain software (for whatever reasons they decide), it would be considered exhibit-A in what is wrong with Microsoft and yet another example of their abuse of power.

For too long, Apple users have given Apple the benefit of the doubt. Any and all cellular problems are attributed to AT&T to the point that the only people I hear complaining about AT&T are iPhone users. Nobody held a gun to Apple’s head and forced them to sign an exclusive deal with AT&T. If AT&T didn’t fulfill its end of the bargain, then Apple has wilfully chose to do little or nothing about it. There is the assumption of some that Apple only puts limits on users as far as hardware devices and software installation so that they can guarantee a better product and superior user experience. Sometimes that’s what they’re doing, but sometimes it’s not.

The thing about Apple is that it is a corporation. It exists to make money. Sometimes this means doing so by providing an outstanding product or service. Sometimes it means doing something at the user’s expense. But at the end of the day, Apple is not a benevolent entity. Neither is Microsoft, of course, but at least Microsoft users don’t pretend otherwise.

I don’t know that there’s a single article of clothing that I don’t have to compromise on. I think every part of me doesn’t fit into the clothes on the rack. I don’t really fit into anything. And often for different reasons.

The biggest thing against me is my height. Particularly that I’m long in the torso. That makes it so I have a lot of difficulty finding shirts that fit. sometimes I have to wear XXL just so that I can tuck my shirts in comfortably. It’s an inconvenience beyond clothes, though. I have to seek out tall cars so that I don’t have to slouch in. While my wife is big on making sure that she has enough leg room, my legs (a little longer than hers) have gotten used to being folded up.

My legs, of course, are a different matter. They’re thick. Really thick. Even when I was thin, they were thick. so I have to get relaxed-fit jeans just so that I can get jeans that fit. I don’t know that they make jeans relaxed enough to relax on my legs. Then there’s the size of pants I wear, which some markets entirely exclude. I don’t know why. They have pants taller and wider in the waist than I am, but the taller ones are invariably slimmer and the wider ones are shorter. I want to throttle whoever the accountant is that figures out what sizes sell well because they leave me out in the cold. I’m not the only one. My friends Tony and Kelvin wear the same size. Both, incidentally, are taller than I am. I never asked them where they got their shirts, though we talk about shoes regularly.

Ahhh, shoes. My damnable size-15 feet. Thank goodness for Zappos. Clancy and I just ordered some shoes from there, which is what actually inspired this post.

Socks are also an issue. They don’t make socks above size-15. At least they don’t make them nearly as available as they make size-15 shoes, which themselves are usually unavailable. I guess they figure that with socks a size-15 guy can get away with size-13 (or 10-13, actually) socks. I guess we can. Except for a couple things. First, I like calf-socks. Goes back to when I was young. Calf-socks themselves are tough to find. Size 13 calf socks do not make it to my calfs. Add that to the pants I wear that are often too short for me and you end up with bare leg showing. A bane of my existence.

The last thing I guess is hats. I have to special order them. Size 8. They don’t even make college caps my size, as far as I have been able to see. When I played football in junior high, my head was far too big for the biggest helmet. Do you know how painful it is to wear a football helmet that’s too small? Do you know the headaches that quite literally come with that? My coach was sympathetic and took me to the equipment room to see if there was anything my size. Glory be, we found a helmet! Only to find out that it fit because the front pad was missing. If we have a kid that has my head and plays football, I am totally going to buy his helment. My wife, meanwhile, is preparing for a C-section if we have any sons.